Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  ‘Did the Wayward Chambers tell you anything useful?’ Hearst said.

  ‘You mean aside from the fact the dead man was a storyteller?’

  ‘I had heard that.’

  They were both silent for a moment.

  ‘We’ve got a name,’ Cora said, and ducked as a pigeon flew too close to her face. ‘And an address. Lodging house where the ’teller was staying. That’s where I’ll start.’ She made for the hatch that led back inside.

  ‘You’ll have to get something better to wear for tomorrow,’ Hearst called after her. ‘You can’t go looking like that.’

  Cora stopped. ‘All right, I’ll play along – go where?’

  ‘The Opening Ceremony. This is an election case now.’

  She put a hand on the warm chimney breast and a pigeon took to the air. She watched it fly silently up towards the Audience. ‘Why did he have to be a storyteller?’

  ‘Garnuck House, six o’clock.’

  ‘Can’t you go, sir? I… Well, it’s not my kind of crowd, is it?’

  Hearst stuffed the empty seed bag into his pocket. ‘It is now. This is your case. Had that from Sillian directly.’

  ‘But all those Commission types, their noses in the air. I won’t know…’

  ‘Won’t know what, Gorderheim?’

  ‘You know.’ She waved at the pigeons, as if they were a demonstration of the rotten grandeur she’d likely see parading at Garnuck House.

  ‘Take Jenkins,’ Hearst said. ‘She’ll be useful.’

  ‘The constable with the teeth?’

  ‘Her mother worked for the Office of Electoral Affairs. Ran it, I should say. Jenkins knows more about that world than your average constable.’

  ‘If her mother was that high in the Commission, how did she end up at the bottom as a constable? She could have done anything with a start like that.’

  ‘Jenkins could ask you the same question,’ Hearst said. ‘You can discuss it while you’re sipping your fine Perlish wine at the Opening Ceremony.’

  ‘You know I don’t drink.’

  ‘You might after tomorrow night.’

  Six

  In disbelief, Cora read the pennysheet headline again: Chambers Chases Justice to Tell the Keeper! Wayward Storyteller’s Death Not a Priority. She tried to clear her throat but ended up with a hacking cough that made her spit a yellow-black mess into the nearby bin.

  Her room in the lodging house was barely furnished: a bed, a cupboard for her clothes – the few that she owned – and a washstand. She didn’t even have a table or a desk. Her mother had been so disappointed by her decision to join the police force that Cora had left home not quite empty-handed, but not far off. Her landlord had offered her a chair when she’d first moved in, soon after joining up, but she’d never taken him up on the offer. There hadn’t seemed much point, given that she spent so little time here. Some weeks she wondered about returning the bed.

  She went back to The Spoke. The ’sheet claimed the reason the Wayward Chambers had been forced to sink to such a level as to visit a police station was because he had no faith the police would find Ento’s killer, and that there was a lack of commitment to the truth – would the Whisperer believe it. The Spoke’s inside knowledge of the case, being the first to break the story, meant they were perfectly positioned to cover every twist and turn, every suspect and arrest, every blunder, of which they expected many.

  What utter nonsense. As if the force wouldn’t try to find the killer. As if they’d have a choice! They did their best to solve cutpurse crime – why would they decide to fall short for a dead storyteller? But what else could be expected, with Butterman’s name at the bottom of the column?

  The rest of the evening edition of The Spoke was given over to the Wayward’s election hopes, so cruelly dashed by the death of their storyteller. A whole column was dedicated to the chequers. Who knew how many marks had already been put down on the Wayward story to win? What would happen to the numbers now? The story was apparently going to strike at the heart of the Union – so The Spoke predicted – and would shock everyone who heard it. As long as the Wayward had courage enough to find another storyteller to tell such a shocking tale, they might still win. But that wasn’t without its risks.

  Cora tossed the ’sheet onto her bed with the rest. Marcus had done as Cora asked, after she’d seen the girl in the Seat of the Commoner, and delivered all the pennysheet editions. But Cora hadn’t realised there would be quite so many of them: morning, afternoon and evening editions of The Fenestiran Times, The Daily Tales and The Spoke, plus The Stave, which was only printed first thing but guaranteed to contain all the day’s news before it had even happened.

  Grimly, she picked up another ’sheet. She’d paid for them, or rather, the station’s petty cash had, so she might as well read them. Couldn’t afford not to, really. The death of Nicholas Ento was an election story, and the ’sheets were alive to the election’s scandals and secrets. Not all that was printed was true, but if there were grains of truth there, hints that might become leads, she needed them.

  The Fenestiran Times led with a different story to The Spoke: the Commission’s decision to use Burlington Palace as the venue for the Perlish election story. A controversial choice, according to the ’sheet, given that the palace was a strategic landmark during the War of the Feathers. The unnamed writer of the column suggested the use of Burlington was intended as a critique of the Perlish for their penny-pinching approach to power – the Commission up to its usual trick of making its views known without ever actually saying anything. Why else make the Perlish tell their story at the site where they massacred the Torn, if not to make them face their past actions? And remind the voters of them too.

  But the view of The Daily Tales was an altogether different story. According to that ’sheet, the choice of Burlington Palace for the Perlish venue was simply long-overdue recognition of the glorious power of Perlanse, and its place in the history of the Union.

  Cora pushed the pennysheets to the floor and sat down on her now print-stained bed. Every story had a different way of being told and it was hard not to see possible connections in all of it to Ento’s murder. She needed a lead, and soon.

  The clock chimed in the hall downstairs; she was going to be late.

  Cora kicked the ’sheets out of the way and felt the pain in her tendon. The old ache. The stitcher who came to the house the day after Ruth left had claimed he’d got all the glass from Cora’s foot. Cora had never been convinced, but the pain had been part of her life for so long now, she couldn’t imagine her body without it. Just as she couldn’t imagine her life with her sister as part of it. The stitcher had been called back to the house just a week after he’d removed the glass, when her father had been found dead.

  She grabbed her coat from the bed and briefly saw Nicholas Ento in the alley, laid out on a cape of stiffened skin. Would going to the Opening Ceremony help her find his killer? She very much doubted it, but she had to hope it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time.

  Cora took stock of herself. Her coat didn’t look any more crumpled than usual, but she brushed mud from a sleeve – Hearst had said she needed to look presentable for the Opening Ceremony. This wasn’t likely to be what the sergeant meant, but she didn’t care. Cora wasn’t going tonight to look ‘fetching’, as her mother might have said. Might have hoped. She stepped out of her room, locking the door behind her, and put the key in her pocket next to her badge.

  Detective Cora Gorderheim was going to Garnuck House to do her job.

  *

  She caught a Clotham’s gig, rather than one belonging to the larger coach company started by the Rustan Simeon Garnuck. That little defiance lifted her mood. As did the fact that she definitely was going to be late. She lit a bindleleaf and promised herself a trip to the Dancing Oak as soon as she could get away.

  The driver dropped her at the main doors, or as close as he could get to them. Carriages and coaches and gigs fought for room, with people wandering
between them, all heading for the wide steps up to Garnuck House. Light spilled from the open doors and tall windows, seeming to draw everyone towards the place. Cora included.

  ‘Detective?’

  Cora found herself face to face with Constable Jenkins, who was almost unrecognisable out of her bulky uniform. Tonight, Jenkins was in a sleek black dress, which showed her to be lean – the kind of leanness that helped when chasing down a cutpurse, Cora thought. The constable’s dark hair was caught up in some kind of scarf, and another scarf was draped around her shoulders. Even her teeth looked different, smarter somehow, as she told Cora how excited she was to be at the Opening Ceremony.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ Jenkins said. ‘We don’t want to miss the dance.’

  ‘Dance?’

  ‘I can’t wait either!’ Jenkins appeared to rein in her enthusiasm. ‘But if you think we should miss it, if there’s something else we should be looking for… Sergeant Hearst, he said I had to help—’

  Someone bumped into Cora. A woman whose back looked to have sprouted feathers made her apologies, but not before she’d looked Cora up and down and frowned. Cora shrugged herself more firmly into her old coat and steered Jenkins up the steps.

  ‘Looks like we’re getting in the way of all these eager folk. And you’re one of them.’

  Jenkins beamed.

  ‘Hearst tells me your mother was high up in the Commission,’ Cora said. ‘Ran electoral affairs.’

  Jenkins nodded. ‘I grew up hearing about voting chests and tents.’

  ‘And yet it didn’t put you off.’

  They came to the top of the steps and joined a slow-moving queue of bodies pressing to get inside.

  ‘To hear the stories,’ Jenkins said, ‘there’s nothing better, is there?’

  Cora was about to mention the betting ring, the smell of blood and sweat and discarded chequers’ slips, but thought better of it. ‘If your mother was a big wheel, why join the constabulary? Why not go into the Commission? Top level?’

  The dreamy look on Jenkins’ face vanished and she looked at Cora with a kind of confidence. The kind that was hard-won.

  ‘I wanted to make my own way,’ Jenkins said. ‘That’s how it should be.’

  Did this young woman know Cora’s story? Was it just coincidence that Cora had ended up with a constable with whom she had a lot in common?

  ‘You’re right,’ Cora said. ‘That is how it should be. But it’s not how it often plays out.’

  ‘Your coat, madam?’

  Cora flinched. She hadn’t noticed the greying man in Commission livery standing in front of her. He was small in the crowd, which was itself small under the painted ceiling and the polished brass and the gilded walls of the entrance hall. He was holding out a hand, his face the plainest thing in sight.

  ‘I’d rather…’

  Without giving it a second thought, Jenkins took the scarf from her shoulders and tossed it over the man’s arm. Then she was away into the crowd, as casual as if she was just walking by the River Stave.

  ‘Madam?’ the servant said to Cora, as one might do when encouraging a child to take their first steps.

  She jammed her hands into her coat pockets and pushed past him, making sure to keep close to Jenkins.

  The hall soon opened onto a large room that was filling up with guests, dignitaries and all manner of important people Cora didn’t recognise – but she did recognise that they were important. It wasn’t just the well-tailored clothes or the tastefully worn jewellery. It was the way they carried themselves: straight-backed, as if they’d never walked a street in which they’d step in something, or on somebody. The set of their shoulders, their light smiles and clean conversations suggested they didn’t even know such streets existed. Not in their Fenest. Had Cora’s parents still been alive, they would likely have known these people. And if Cora’s mother had had her way, Cora would be part of this crowd, rather than watching it from the outside.

  She and Jenkins were caught nonetheless, and were moved, slowly, into the room. Four huge chandeliers hung from the ceiling, each made up of six rings of glass-encased oil lamps: the six realms of the Union. There was no escaping the form of things.

  The light from the chandeliers caught everything: people’s drinks, their jewellery, even the buttons on their jackets and the stitching of their dresses. The waiters’ trays flashed in the crowd like mirrors. Everything was gold-tinted. The lavish fountain at the centre of the great space only heightened the effect. Its tall spouts of water were shot through with rainbows, and they poured down on a set of unnervingly detailed dogs: a rabble caught in bronze, mid-frolic, as if enjoying a perfectly-timed rain storm.

  ‘His great loves,’ Jenkins said, following Cora’s gaze.

  ‘Sorry?’ She wiped the fountain’s spray from her face, then wondered if it was actually sweat. Perhaps she should have left her coat at the door.

  ‘Simeon Garnuck. When he moved to Fenest he came to love dogs. Those there, they’re modelled on his pets.’

  ‘More money than sense,’ Cora grumbled.

  ‘Only until the Commission took it away from him. Garnuck had debts all over Fenest…’ Jenkins coughed, and looked away. ‘Debts that just so happened to be called in when the Rustans lost the Assembly to the Caskers.’

  ‘Rivers, not roads, eh?’

  ‘Something like that. Might have pleased the Washerwoman, but it wasn’t the Commission’s finest hour.’

  ‘There’s plenty in the running for that title.’ Cora made for the nearest wall, wishing, and not for the first time, that she wasn’t so tall. The job wasn’t always about intimidation. Often it paid to go unnoticed.

  Jenkins took two glasses from a passing server, and Cora accepted one, just to have something to occupy her hands. She asked Jenkins what kind of stories she favoured.

  ‘Well,’ the constable said, baring her teeth in a huge grin. She’d obviously been waiting for that question. ‘My mother always said the funny ones were the best bet for black stones, but I think funnies have a cruelty in them.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t vote for that?’

  Jenkins shook her head. ‘I like it when things end well, for everyone. Or as near as can be.’

  ‘Our line of work doesn’t encourage happy endings,’ Cora said.

  ‘But we still look for them,’ Jenkins said quietly, then sipped her drink.

  For a moment neither spoke, just watched the gilded and the garish pass by.

  ‘Wasn’t a happy end for Nicholas Ento,’ Cora said eventually, ‘but we’ll find an ending, happy or otherwise, when we find out why he was killed. Let’s start with tonight. What are we doing here? All of us, I mean.’

  ‘Right,’ the constable said. She downed her drink and put the glass on a passing tray. ‘Tonight is as much about the Perlish term ending as it is the start of the election. That’s why the wine tonight is from Perlanse, for instance. Both duchies.’

  ‘And why it smells like horse piss. You seem to be enjoying it. Here.’ Cora handed Jenkins her untouched glass.

  ‘The cultural item,’ Jenkins said, ‘that’ll be Perlish too.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘If I had to guess I’d say it would be the Hildantante. That’s usually the Perlish choice for these kinds of functions. Don’t worry, Detective. You won’t have to join in.’

  ‘Join in with what?’

  ‘Oh, sorry – the Hildantante’s a folk dance.’

  Cora groaned. A folk dance.

  ‘But we’ve got the formal opening first,’ Jenkins said, ‘with the parade and the unveiling.’

  Cora looked around to see if anyone was smoking. A heavy-set woman stepped on her foot and the old ache flared.

  ‘… that’s why it’s more difficult,’ Jenkins was saying.

  ‘Sorry?’ Cora said.

  ‘For the Perlish. As the incumbents, they have the hardest job in this election. Their story is judged more harshly than those of the other realms. They should have
done a better job when they were in power, I suppose.’

  ‘You mean not all the voters enjoyed reduced trade taxes while the Perlish were in charge of the Assembly, Constable? No cheap cheese and wine for all their balls and banquets?’

  ‘Hard to enjoy a banquet when the sewers are overflowing,’ Jenkins said, warming to her subject. ‘It’s as if the Perlish Chambers have their own personal roads to travel the Union – they’ve done nothing about the state of them in Fenest. Holes big enough to swallow a gig. And the gangs of bandits – some no older than children – in every alley. And the markets and shops—’

  ‘And yet here we are, at a ball. Or is this a banquet?’

  ‘Neither,’ Jenkins muttered. ‘They’ve done nothing but line their own pockets.’

  ‘“A Perlish pocket is always lined by another’s silk.”’

  ‘Perlanse is too cold for silkworms, that’s why.’

  ‘As a lover of stories, I thought you’d be less literal,’ Cora said. ‘Some would argue it’s the Commission that should have done something about the sewers and the roads.’

  ‘The Commission tallies how much money there is to spend. Whoever holds the Assembly decides where that money goes.’

  ‘Wine and cheese. So, nobody is envying the Perlish storyteller then?’

  ‘Storytellers. They send two.’

  ‘Because they do everything in pairs.’

  Jenkins shrugged. ‘The duchies are still formally separate.’

  ‘If the Perlish have the hardest job of winning this election,’ Cora said, ‘that could be a reason for one of their number to kill another realm’s ’teller, if the Perlish thought that story presented a particular challenge to them.’

  ‘I suppose the motive is there,’ Jenkins said, ‘though no one would go so far, surely? There are laws, and traditions, that protect ’tellers.’

  ‘They didn’t protect Nicholas Ento, did they?’ Cora said.

  Jenkins looked like she might have an answer to that, but then something seemed to catch her eye on the other side of the room. ‘He has some nerve.’